Question Time 18th January 2024
The Panel:
Bim Afolami (Conservative)
Emily Thornberry (Labour)
Hashi Mohamed (Barrister and Author)
Kate McCann (Political Journalist)
Venue: Peterborough
Emily Thornberry, not her real name, Lieutenant Colonel (temporary) The Right Honourable and Learned Emily Ann Nugee, KC MP – properly addressed in this parish as ‘Lardy Emily’- has been the Labour Member of Parliament for Islington South and Finsbury since 2005. Currently the Shadow Attorney General for England and Wales, Lardy is legal establishment royalty. Husband Sir Christopher Nugee is a High Court of Appeal judge and the son of a pre-eminent Chancery barrister. Lardy’s own father was an international lawyer and one-time Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations.
Sixty-three-year-old Lardy copes with the cost of living crisis by accepting donations, including tens of thousands of pounds from Lord Waheed Alli. One of the Northeast Surrey Alii’s, Croydon-born Waheed is a media entrepreneur and TV executive. A Tony crony ennobled by Labour prime minister and unindicted war criminal Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, the Baron Alii has subsequently, from his seat on the red leather benches, donated to Labour MPs.
An awardee of the vile Stonewall organisation, according to wiki Waheed uses his position (behave yourselves) to promote ‘gay’ ‘rights’, youth and education. Which leads us to Lady Thornberry’s declared interests. These include £855 worth of tickets for the ‘Trans in the City Gala’. Puffins who pride themselves on being a little bit old-fashioned might find themselves wondering, what prey is ‘Trans in the City’?
According to the guff, the event is a gala and awards ceremony at East Wintergarden, Canary Wharf, London. The inspirational event launches Trans Awareness Week and welcomes 600 members of the trans and non-binary communities.
Disappointed Puffins who missed the two-and-a-half-hour-long extravaganza can watch the livesteam via this link.
They will notice a strange coincidence. All the other 599 (somewhat unconvincing) lay-dees participating in the event look and dress just like Emily Thornberry, but have slightly deeper voices.
Lady Emily also earns by charging £600 a time to host phone-ins on LBC and £250 a go to guest in podcasts. Concerned regular readers and listeners will be relieved to hear that the less mercenary Alan Bennet, Bruce Forsythe and the Reverend Doctor Ian Paisley appear on QT Review’s accompanying podcast free of charge.
Elsewhere in the small print, despite having to resign from Ed Milliband’s shadow cabinet for sneering on social media at a white van gentleman’s display of England and West Ham flags, her ladyship doesn’t despise the people’s games sufficiently enough to refuse to accept £396 worth of hospitality at Wendyball’s Carabao Cup Final.
Not quite down with the brothers in the ‘hood, Bim Afolami was educated at Eton College after which he read Modern History at University College, Oxford. One of the Berkshire Afolamis, Bim’s mother and father were respectively an impoverished NHS doctor and a pharmacist. Before a career in politics (he represents Hitchin and Harpenden for the Conservative Party) the 37-year-old spent a decade in the City of London working as a corporate lawyer and then as a Senior Executive with the incorruptible clear consciences at HSBC.
Mrs Afolami, the mother of Bim’s three children, is the dippy Henrietta ‘Hetti’ Jackson-Stops. The £43,000 a year St Mary’s, Calne, old girl has also pursued a career in law. An ‘experienced lawyer with a demonstrated history of working in the dispute resolution industry, skilled in Mediation, International Law, Immigration Law, Public Law, Arbitration, International Arbitration and Dispute Resolution,’ as described by, erm, herself on her LinkedIn page.
Bim having married even further away from the street, Hetti’s family features in Peerage.com. In an attempt to reach peak peerage, Miss Henrietta’s father either married another Jackson-Stops or took his wife’s name to make his progeny appear posher.
As if setting themselves up in competition with the bizarrely monikered offspring of the Somerset Rees-Moggs (which include a Sextus and a Boniface), the Afolami-Jackson-Stops children are Zachary, Samual and Frederick Gervase Essien.
London-born Kate McCann (not that Kate McCann, the journalist) holds a degree in politics from Newcastle University. A Westminster obsessive, Miss McCann became a parliamentary researcher in the House of Commons after completing her education. During this time, she was employed as an intern by an unnamed shadow cabinet minister while writing about her experiences in the Guardian.
Following that internship, she worked as a Guardian journalist for two years before moving to City AM and the Sun where she was their Whitehall Correspondent. The 35-year-old joined the Telegraph in 2015 and has also contributed to Lie News and Talk TV. In September of last year, Kate became the editor of Times Radio. She holds an honorary doctorate of arts from the University of Sunderland.
Kate came to prominence due to an incident in a live TV debate during the 2022 Tory leadership election. As if suffering a flashback to a particularly unpleasant experience on holiday (am I allowed to say that?), she fainted on air, causing the debate between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss to come to an abrupt halt.
Hashi Mohamed is a London-based barrister, author, broadcaster, and public speaker. Unusually for legal types invited onto the BBC, his speciality isn’t human rights but planning and environmental law.
Born in Somalia and raised in Kenya, at nine years of age Hashi came to Britain as a ‘refugee’ after his father was killed in a car crash. Unaccompanied by an adult, he lived with an aunt. His mother subsequently joined the family.
After completing a degree in Law and French at the University of Hertfordshire, Hansi went on to study at the University of Oxford.
In a Guardian interview, the 39-year-old pleaded a deprived childhood but QT Review remains unconvinced. Later in the article, another of Hashi’s Kenyan family are described as,
‘An uncle who, like his brother (Hansi Mohamed’s father), was a natural entrepreneur who had built a thriving business and a large house. His uncle’s multilingual children had attended the best private schools.’
Oh well. Need to seek refuge from, not.
Similarly, the old country was such a gruesome place worth escaping from that as soon as Hansi turned 18, became a British citizen and was issued with a British passport … he returned to Kenya!
Also in the Guardian interview, ungrateful Hansi was scathing about how he and his family were treated as ‘refugees’ in England. In his own words, after being provided with housing and benefits they ‘were left to fend for themselves’.
Didums. Why do we bother with these people? Send them back.
After his education, surprise, surprise, the ungrateful ‘refugee’ joined the BBC as a broadcast journalist before returning to law in 2011.
Mr Mohamed has also put pen to paper. His mighty work is entitled, ‘People Like Us. What It Takes to Make It in Modern Britain’.
Apparently, people like us would rather read about ingratitude than the goings in an 18th-century libertine French castle. In the Amazon best seller’s list, ‘People Like Us. What It Takes to Make It in Modern Britain’, sits an appreciative 63,124 places above the Maquis De Sade’s ‘120 Days of Sodom’.
***
Question one. Is the government right in continuing to push the Rwanda plan? Is it worth it, added Fiona Bruce.
Bim Afolami thought it was, as it is part of a plan to reduce illegal immigration. He outlined other parts of the plan and claimed that this was working as the number of illegal immigrants crossing the channel is dropping.
Lardy Emily was angered by people drowning in the channel. She pretended to be even angrier. She became near-hysterical. Has she spent too much time partying with trannies? But she had no suggestions, let alone solutions, to the problem. Throughout the programme, her’s was an odd performance based on fake emotion. Expect more of this from the Labour side of the uni-party as the election approaches, as the comrades need to conceal from the Red Wall constituencies precisely what they need to promote to the Labour-supporting immigrant ghettos.
Hashi has decided that all of us already know it isn’t worth it. Two years ago he’d been to Dresden. There was an outbreak of multi-cultural cricket involving an Etretraian, the Israelis, Germans and a reciprocal agreement with Rwanda. I lost track of the play. Lardy Emily nodded vigorously even though she, like the rest of us, didn’t know what he was on about.
Hashi ranted. ‘Scum’, ‘disgusting’, ‘poison’, ‘unconscionable’, ‘loonies’. He was bigly triggered that the millionaire judges and millionaire barristers get the blame for delaying the deportation of illegal immigrants while troughing massive fees at your expense.
Some Brexit supporters had slipped through the BBC net. One hinted the county can’t take any more immigrants. The other wondered how the illegals were allowed to get across Europe to the coast of France in the first place.
Kate began by quoting the opinion polls, those bizarre fake news vehicles consisting of percentages that are used to influence rather than reflect public opinion. This conversation opens up bigger questions. What about legal immigration? Our politics has failed to debate this.
Lardy Emily interrupted to say what needs to be done but not how to do it. She talked nonsense about a successful returns policy during the last Labour government whereas Labour boasted at the time of an open-door immigration policy with search parties being sent out to encourage incomers.
The second question was Trumphobic to the point of The Donald being accused of threatening the planet. Should we be scared?
Lardy thought The Donald might be elected president again. For the third time, one feels obliged to mention. Lardy claimed she had, ‘More Ankela Merkle in her than Theresa May.’ The tranny gala strikes again! When asked, Lardy said she meant you shouldn’t kow tow to Trump. La Bruce quoted Lardy as previously calling the 45th (and 46th and 47th) President, ‘A racist and a sexual predator threatening the world order.’ On cue, many in the carefully selected BBC audience clapped like seals. Lardy smirked as if a drag act halfway through a particularly off-colour joke involving constipation and a night out in Bangkok in the 1980s.
Bim wasn’t scared, he was wary and retained confidence, for reasons known only to himself, in the US military and intelligence services.
La Bruce quoted more boring insults previously thrown at The Donald.
Would Prime Minister Kier Starmer stand up to Trump? Lardy eulogised her boss, the boss who failed to prosecute Jimmy Saville the Asian Muslim rape gangs but did prosecute the Horizon scandal postmasters and postmistresses.
Kate thought there was a problem with the state of our politics. Trump is a quick-fix merchant addressing issues that can’t be fixed quickly.
Hashi is a huge fan of the United States, especially the judiciary. Why? The American legal system is a farce. Hashi was bigly, bigly triggered. He quoted The Donald telling his ill voters in the Iowa primary to get out and vote and then die. Hashi forgot to add *Donald Trump voice* ‘Because the dead vote for Biden’ *end of Donald Trump voice*
Hashi went on to be bigly, bigly, bigly triggered by the ‘insurgency’. Emily nodded and nodded and nodded.
Advice to the bed-wetters in the media-political bubble in London. If you throw mud at the mud monster, the mud monster gets bigger and bigger and bigger. How stupid are all these clever people?
Question 3. Ouch. Given NHS waiting times, should we follow the example of the King and Princess Kate and go private? Now, before we start, everyone on the other side of the Question Time desk has private healthcare. Do you honestly think £20,000 an hour Fiona Bruce is on the NHS?
Hashi thought this a difficult conversation as the NHS has almost become a religion. He used the phrase, ‘I use the NHS, I can go private, I use the NHS.’ I’ll leave Puffins to decide what that means in practice when coming from the mouth of a barrister. He came over all sensible and noted we put in less than other developed countries but get less out than we should. He spoilt his copybook by blaming the Tories. In his heart, this is an institution, a pillar of society, but we have to confront the fact that it isn’t working as it should.
An audience member focused on productivity. Why not get more out of the existing NHS staff? Why not indeed.
Nobody should have to go private, began Bim. He blamed increasing waiting lists on strikes. Rightly so.
Lardy set off with the ham drag act again. The Health Service was perfect under the last Labour Government. Fourteen wasted Tory years had wrecked it. What was Lardy going to do? More digital. Is that a prostrate reference? At which point, unable to bleach from his mind an image of Emily Thornberry armed with a rubber glove and sharp-edged wedding ring, this humble reviewer ran upstairs to bed and spent the night sleeping with one eye open.
© Always Worth Saying 2024
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